5 ways cloud 'supercharges' enterprise initiatives

Cloud in and of itself may or may not add value to the business, but it certainly can help supercharge other key enterprise initiatives.

Cloud can be positioned as the platform for a range of initiatives intended to help increase the agility and ability of the organization’s business technology. That’s the gist of a new book, authored by Pankaj Arora, Raj Biyani and Salil Dave, all Microsoft executives.

In To the Cloud: Powering an Enterprise, the authors explain how enterprise cloud benefits other initiatives within the enterprise:

1) Invest in shared services: "The ability to share physical servers is one cloud benefit, but the cloud can do more. Because a cloud scale unit caan be more granular than an application, enterprises can create functional components that can be shared across applications."

2) Consolidate global platforms: "In the cloud, global platforms can become a set of globally hosted, loosely coupled services with a logical architecture, versus a service hosted in a single region but offered broadly."

3) Simplify application portfolios: "Migrating an ecosystem to the cloud presents the opportunity to improve it."

4) Improve user experiences: "The cloud's ability to process information on behalf of devices with weaker CPUs, along with the ease of network access available via public clouds, will help IT meet user expectations."

5) Onboard shadow IT applications: “It is not uncommon to discover that shadow applications support important processes in an enterprise,” the authors observe. “Cloud computing’s support for rapid development and utility-style billing can counter fears about most shadow projects.”